schliz writes: Alcatel-Lucent's research arm, Bell Labs, is building low-cost robots that represent remote participants in meeting rooms. Researchers hope it will address the issue of the natural, non-verbal "voting mechanism", by which people determine who should speak based on who most people are looking at. The technology will likely be priced in the "hundreds of dollars" rather than the tens of thousands that the likes of Cisco and Polycom charge for high-end telepresence rooms.